Elanso

On Saturday May 10th 2008, I’ll be teaching a full-day course, Influencing Strategy by Design, for mid to senior level designers on how to influence and improve strategic decision-making within their department or company.

This eight hour, hands-on course will be co-taught with Tom Chi as part of the Involution Master Academy (an educational program for experienced professionals in design and related fields) in Sunnyvale, CA. Attendance is very limited to ensure each participant gets extensive hands-on time with the instructors. Registration opens today so get in soon if you’re interested.

Topics Covered

• Key Take Aways: At a high-level we advocate these for any designer or design team interested in expanding their strategic involvement or influence.
• Organizational Dynamics: Lack of organizational influence is frequently blamed on either reporting structure, or a lack of organizational understanding about the role of design. While both of these factors may be in play, focusing only on them to increase influence is unlikely to yield results.
• Metrics: Taking the initiative to measure and track explicit customer experience metrics provides designers with a significant amount of leverage during strategic planning and product design.
• Design Skills: We’ve distilled four attributes central to design that provide unique value to strategic decision-making.
• Executive Presentations: When working on strategic initiatives that impact business direction, more likely than not, designers will need input and buy-in from key stakeholders.

The Official Description
This full-day course will teach designers how to greatly expand their influence by synthesizing and articulating clear, actionable business and product strategies. Often, career opportunities for designers are artificially limited by org charts that fail to fully capitalize on the galvanizing role that design can have beyond product or marketing. This course empowers designers by giving them tools to impact strategy, by illuminating important decision-drivers like market or user research, web analytics, financials, and product reports.

Created for experienced designers who want greater influence over strategic decision-making within their department or company, this hands-on course will immerse you in principles for communicating and influencing strategy and teach you and practical skills and techniques through group activities with Luke and your fellow students. By the end you will have new insight into the untapped potential that your design skills have to transform your career. See complete course details.

Hope to see some of you there!

Tags: education, strategy, design vision, design organizations, decision making, communication